You understand correctly – here, you either need to play for a set of 50,000, or spend about 15 days gaining experience. 28 is too much. I personally haven't been able to figure out the optimal sequence of moves.
By the way, there's a wide range of opportunities for testing here – lots of caves, skeletons, and graveyards. It's unclear why this wasn't simply removed in the editor?

Added 15 minutes later
I sincerely hope that more people with experience in the game will join. I'm very interested in what Nzol and Fireball would achieve here, as recognized experts.